[Katekyou Hitman Reborn!]: "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" (5927 for Ruka)
I...really should have had this done a long time ago, but I took kind of a hiatus from the Internet and fandom for a while, so, Ruka, kindly forgive my tardiness? Well, at any rate, I STARTED it, got stuck somewhere around the middle, and said to hell with it back then due to my normal bitchy frustrated-ness. (*laugh*) Hopefully, since I don't feel so pressured to contribute in fandom as I did when I first entered, the end result will be better than what it would have been if I'd actually done this on time.
OH LAWDY.
Written for rukawagf, for being the awesomest person on the planet faithfully reading every single one of my fics ever since my Code Geass days, including that terrible cross-dressing smut I did for the anonymous kink meme. She's a regular trooper. ♥
Her reviews are always ridiculously fun to read, too. :) Oh Ruka, you're so good at pretending to actually LIKE the things that I write...! *shot* *laugh*
Title: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Author: Carson McCullers Lorelei DiAngelo
Rating: I AM LABELING THIS AS 'R', GODDAMMIT, AND IF ANY OF YOU TRY AND TELL ME OTHERWISE... I dunno, I'll change the rating, and whine about it a lot, or something.
Pairing: Gokudera ---> Tsuna. This is the most canonical fic I have ever written, lol. Oh, Amano Akira, you and your obligatory man-crush characters. (Gokkun's got nothing on Diethard from Code Geass, though. Sorry, Amano-sensei. Hunh, now I want Diethard/Lelouch fic from Code Geass season 1 verse. Shit, I just dug my own grave, there.) For the record, there's also some 80 ---> 59 in this that ultimately doesn't matter, so you can ignore it if you like, Ruka.
Summary: In which Gokudera's life is categorized by more than just one word, and I blatantly rip off someone else's writing style. (Forget whose, though.) Also, %85 of the cast gets the shaft when it comes to screentime in this fic.
For: rukawagf, who seems to have taken it upon herself to be my personal pimp. SO YOU GUYS BETTER WATCH IT, OR SHE'LL SLAP A HO. (!) Ahaha, on a more serious note, nothing makes me smile more than Ruka's reviews (yamikakyuu's are pretty good, too XD), just because she puts so much...ah, ENTHUSIASM in them, so to speak. :) Hopefully this is up your alley of things 59 ---> 27, Ruka. You're tough to please with this pairing.
Notes: I'd like to point out that it sure sucks, shipping everything in this fandom. Also, wao, four fics in and I haven't even written anything for my OTP yet. Doesn't matter anyway, 'cuz now after 191 it looks like we're all going to be shipping Gokkun/Ryohei, for the extreme justice. And etc. (Or, uh, still shipping Gamma/nubile teenaged boys, as if we all weren't already. GOD DAMN IT, SOMEONE WRITE THIS ALREADY.)
Word Count: 3,616. I'm sorry this wasn't longer, Ruka, but the style I was writing in kind of errs towards brevity. I AM A WORM. D:
His first memory is this: a voice on the phone; childlike, yet in possession of an unmistakeable air of maturity. "I've found the man that you will follow for the rest of your life. And if you can't follow him, then you're more than welcome to kill him."
"As a matter of fact, I'd like it if you tried killing him, anyway. Where these things are concerned, he really is a bit soft."
"A condition? You're free to do whatever you like. But I'll be counting on you for the results."
And a click in his ears sharper than the hammer on any gun.
If he can't find a family to fit into, then he'll just go ahead and make one of his own.
{ ground zero }
And that first memory which leads to this: a back alley in Florence, with a fifteen-hour flight and the rest of his life ahead of him, though he had no way of knowing that, yet. His bombs and his cigs tucked carefully in the duffel bag next to his visa. And crouched behind a trash can, shoulders hunched, the hand down his jeans the hand that was curled into a tight, unrelenting fist.
(It'll go like this, or so he thinks: a foreigner's face, blurred and nondescript, pinned to the ground by the palm of his hand. Curses, spat at him, as the man struggles and writhes against the fields of debris. Smoke drifting by in a lazy blur. He lights the bastard's last cigarette. His fingers twitch until everything explodes.)
But if he were to be completely honest with himself, what he was actually aiming for was the man who he would follow for the rest of his life.
{ first impression }
Unfortunately, Gokudera Hayato's first memory of Sawada Tsunayoshi is this: a boy, brown-haired and brown-eyed, blinking up at him from behind a school desk with all the naivety of clean slate written upon his stupid, smiling face.
So he kicks the pansy's desk, just to see his expression change.
But maybe, the only reason he did it that way was because he was too chicken to just go up and say hello.
From the time he was born until the time he left home, he was nothing more than a reminder of a past better left swept under the rug. His only real memory of his mother was a memory not of her, but of what she'd left behind - cold stares, a whisper behind hands, and a present that, to him, never stopped stinking of burning rubber.
He remembers resenting her, but as he lounges against a classroom window and listens to the pathetic whiner of a Vongola boss attempt to peace-talk his way out of a certain beating, he comes to the realization that he no longer remembers loving her.
{ second chance }
The first memory of the man he will follow for the rest of his life is this: Sawada Tsunayoshi, singed and bruised and bloody in more places than one, flopping on his ass from exhaustion in nothing more than his boxer shorts and still managing to have the gall celebrate the fact that the both of them are alive. That Gokudera, too, is alive.
That he's alive the next time he gets into a fight. And the next time.
And all the times after that.
His memory of what Reborn says to him is this:
"You should have tried harder, at killing him. Then the two of you wouldn't be so disappointingly soft."
His memory of the day that follows is hazy, at best. He follows the Tenth everywhere - studies him, guards him, keeps close to him. It's that last that makes him wonder if somewhere, along the line, he hadn't confused the word 'Family' for family, but the one thing he'd never bothered to learn in his studies was the Japanese equivalent for the same word.
Besides, he doesn't like Japan. Yamamoto Takeshi is proof enough of that.
{ and then there were three }
The first memory of his obnoxious rival is this: kids running, to and fro, below the entrance to the school, pointing wildly at the spectacle up above them.
"Holy shit!" they say, "someone's going to jump!"
And Gokudera, on the way to finangle dynamite from his father's mafia connections in Japan, looks up at the dark shape silhouetted against the sky, and scoffs, and thinks that if the idiot's going to do it, he should just hurry up and do it.
Of course, if he'd have known then how things were going to turn out in the future, he probably would have offered his ready assistance.
This is something that doesn't change until they grow older: the Tenth, because he is far more progressive and grand than the other bosses before him, doesn't punish the baseball idiot for his impertinence - rather, accepts it, as humbly and unassumingly as he accepts everything else in his life. The same way that he accepts the cow's stupidity, the Cavallone's meddling, and the lawn-head's extremity.
So then why, why, can't he accept Gokudera's unconditional life and loyalty, as well?
Of course, with conditions such as those, it was only natural that it would lead to this: in the restroom, cutting class, back jammed into the corner of the stall and a leg on the toilet seat; "Hggggh," he says, trying not to scream. He thinks of the Tenth, always walking backwards from him, and wonders what it means when the sight of that always prompts him to give chase.
(It'll go like this, or so he thinks: he'll take a step, two steps, and close the gap between them, hands going to the Tenth's shoulders in a gentle, but confident hold. The Tenth has long, fringed eyelashes - he'll blink them once, in surprise, but not in the usual routine caution. He'll say his name, in a concerned question.
And Gokudera, possessing the courage in fantasy that he lacks in reality, will be able to say what he means, for once, and mean what he says, and so he will: "I swore that I'd follow you, Tenth, and so I always will. But it's lonely, sometimes, always looking at the line of your back."
And the Tenth will cover his hands with his own, and stand on his tiptoes, because he is deceptively slight like that, and he'll tilt his head up; upward - )
And Gokudera comes, with a terrible cry, heedless of where he is and how foolish this makes him.
{ fourscore }
His worst memory is this: in a warehouse, under fire, crouched behind oil drums that could erupt into flames at any second, and the Tenth is at his side. They were seventeen, just normal kids for once and going for a coffee when the first M-80 opened fire on them. There's no X-Gloves, no Dying Will Bullet, no Reborn shouting over their shoulders about what they're supposed to do. There's just Gokudera, down to his last three explosives, and the Tenth, huddling desperately at his side.
"I wish, I wish," he says, through clenched, chattering teeth, "I wish that Yamamoto were here."
It gives Gokudera a sort of fierce satisfaction to know that, on that day seven years later, that the baseball idiot was there; had been there, sword at his side, and hadn't been able to stop the Tenth from dying any more than the rest of them had.
But that, of course, means nothing, when compared to the terrible crushing pain of his heart.
The future is a far-off thing when you're fifteen years old, though. He sits and plays mahjong with the Tenth and his family and his Family, and loses on purpose because, well, the Tenth can't possibly be good at everything. It's enough that there's an ideal in his every action; something for people to drift towards, to lay down their life for.
Their legs brush, under the table, and Gokudera inhales; forgets everything, for one great, glorious second, even the fact that he's supposed to be losing.
"Sorry," the Tenth says, warily, as though afraid that he's going to explode.
The truth of which leads to something like this: in a restroom, in Shinjuku, surrounded by the telephone numbers of girls in possession of various degrees of morality, belt in his teeth to keep from biting his tongue. It's only that he's not good enough. How can he expect the Tenth to surrender his heart to someone he constantly has to save? His hands falter, and he almost loses his grip.
(It'll go like this, if he has his way: a powerful opponent, one that even the Tenth himself would undoubtedly have to bloody his hands over. He'll dispatch him in a pinch, with a careless flick of his wrist - rather like the one he's doing now; faster, harder, tangible. It's another foreigner's face, blurred and nondescript. If he squints hard enough, it looks a little bit like his father.
When the smoke clears, the Tenth will say his name; tentatively, but with feeling. "G-Gokudera-kun!" He won't say the boyish, naive things that he usually says out of surprise ('Wow!', 'That's amazing!', or 'He knocked him out with a single shot...' among those - because they're powerful, they both are, and modesty can only extend so far). Maybe he won't say anything - reality is harsh. The joy of fantasy, though, is that things will always proceed as planned, simply because he wishes it that way.
"I'm glad that you're my right-hand man.")
And there doesn't need to be any more to it than that, for him to go soaring over the edge.
In ten years, one of those wishes will come true. But by then, he'll have discovered what it is that he actually wants, and all of it will mean naught.
{ five o'clock shadow }
He has no memory of the first time he gets drunk.
He has a nightmare, though, of running down a long, long corridor where only darkness and shadow seemed to reach.
He also has a large, conspicuous red mark on the side of his neck.
It makes his heart flutter in his chest to think of the memory he's missed, to think of himself, held; marked, by the Tenth - as a precious possession, maybe, or even as a person.
The former exalts him, beyond comprehensible belief, but he can't quite figure why the latter terrifies him, as well.
But it's Yamamoto who avoids him, in the halls, who turns his head away with an uncharacteristic tension to his frame, and the Tenth smiles, desperately, and tries to smooth things over.
Why?
{ sixth sense }
"Well," the baseball idiot says, awkwardly, still holding on to his obnoxious, infuriating half-grin, "all you had to do was use your imagination, you know? I've just never been smart enough," he says, and that grin falters, by the barest milli-step, "to be particularly creative, if you know what I mean."
Gokudera, pale and cold in the light of mid-November, pulls the scarf he'd wrapped around his neck all the way up to his nose. "Sorry," he mutters, and it's the first and last time he'll say anything like that to the Vongola's Guardian of the Rain.
"It'd probably have been better if you hadn't said that," Yamamoto admits, pulling his woolen ski cap down over his eyes, and he lets out a breath that is the same pale ephemeral color as Gokudera's hair. "It wasn't as though you'd lied, after all."
A very uncharacteristic noise, from between clenched teeth.
"You never looked, not once, at me."
"Did you guys make up?" the Tenth asks, the next, beaming at them hopefully from across his desk in the classroom.
Gokudera gnaws on an unlit cigarette irritably. "As if anyone would want to make up with an idiot like him," he growls, because the point of it is, after all, to pretend as though he doesn't feel like he's just been shot.
"Well, that's probably true," Yamamoto laughs, voice light, and goes back to his lunch.
His memory of when everything began to change started like this:
"G-Gokudera-kun..." At a streetlight in Narita, on the way to pick up the Cavallone from the airport. Fresh out of high school - it wasn't that the Tenth wasn't smart enough for college, but rather, smart enough to see that there'd be no need for such a thing in a future as glorious as his. And because he hadn't gone, Gokudera hadn't, either. He doesn't bother dwelling on what a choice like that might portend.
"Can I try...one of your cigarettes?"
He's grown up lithe and lean, but the Tenth is still slight, with a narrow chest and a voice that never seemed to grow deeper with age, or with any of the things that they'd been through. He'll probably cough, and wheeze, and hate it, but it doesn't really matter. Gokudera digs the smokes from out of his jeans pocket and wishes that he'd at least had the grace to smoke lights.
But the Tenth lights one, and takes a puff, and though he stumbles a bit on it as the taller boy had predicted, he takes another puff, and another one after that, and one after that. And after a minute or so, he drops the butt onto the ground, and grinds it unhesitatingly under his toe.
"That wasn't so bad," he acknowledges, smiling, and Gokudera wonders why, suddenly, despite the smoke still drifting by on the breeze, that the air smells unmistakably like lilies.
{ lucky sevens }
He sets to change himself, little by little, so that he becomes a man worthy of the Tenth's right side.
"I think you should just keep going the way that you are," Yamamoto says, candidly, but of course Gokudera doesn't listen.
"If you truly love him, Hayato," his sister says, in one of her rare familial cameos, shooting the baseball idiot needles out of the corner of her eyes, "then nothing else but love should matter."
And though he wishes more than anything that he hadn't, he vomits all over her shoes, regardless.
The problem is, when he thinks of a word like 'love', his face grows red and he feels distinctly uncomfortable, and he can't imagine ever crossing that line. Even in his ever-colorful imagination, that carefully-constructed rainbow prison, he never crosses that line. There are gentle touches, to his face, arms around his waist and sometimes a feather-light brush of lips in a kiss, but in the instant he tries to imagine nails like claws or a hand between his thighs, he grows so embarrassed and miserable that he thinks he might die.
In reality, the best reward is just to be by the Tenth's side.
So he is, even as the last of the bullets riddle his boss's chest, and he bursts through the door a second too late, explosives out and at the ready for the roomful of men who have already gone.
So he is, even as the coffin starts to lose its brilliant, glossy sheen, and the cloying scent of lilies is enough to make him choke.
So he is, when the lid cracks, one day, and a small, rosy hand appears, and the unruly brown hair a moment after.
"Tenth!"
{ crazy eights }
That's the happiest memory of his life.
The saddest comes seconds after:
"G-Gokudera-kun... Why is the future me...in a coffin?"
But that's in a future that may or may not come to pass. Eight years before that, he was a boy stretched out on the balcony of the Tenth's bedroom at night, finding a strange solitary comfort from the lines of Aquarius.
"Is it a hobby of yours?" the Tenth asks, politely, stepping out into the chill with some tea.
Hobbies? He had those, once. Even as a stray dog in Italy, he had those - things like playing cards, or the piano, or the mythological folklore of foreign countries.
Now, what is it that he has?
"You can find your direction with the stars," Gokudera says, contentedly, sticking his finger up the nose of Orion, eyes half-mast. "It'll be useful if the Family's ever separated - being able to find a rendevous point without relying on the use of electronics. It can be used for reconnaissance, too, or keeping track of time."
"Oh," the Tenth says carefully, mildly; "I thought that maybe you did it for fun."
He's shivering, out in the cold, and Gokudera shrugs out of his sweatshirt; holds it out, helpfully. Hobbies are weak points that enemies can exploit, but it should be all right enough now that he only has one thing in the world that he cares about.
"We can start," he says, smiling, and his heart does backflips in his chest as their hands touch, briefly, and his smile is returned.
The moon is in the eighth house of Jupiter one night, and his most bittersweet memory is this: the two of them, huddled under a quilt with their faces turned to the sky, and a star falls like an angel out of the air.
"Make a wish, Tenth!" He'll do whatever it takes to make it come true.
But this is why he hates reality:
"Then, I wish that none of this had ever happened to me."
"I mean - I wish that I hadn't gotten involved. Gotten any of you involved. Never heard the word 'mafia' before in my life. That we could've been normal classmates - just normal friends. That I could have gotten better at everything on my own."
One of the gaps between the two of them is the gap that's somewhat easy to overcome. Shoulders, stiff under his cold arms, and a face, warm and bewildered, pressed tightly into the crook of his shoulder.
"Then, then - " Gokudera says calmly, as calm as the eye in the center of a hurricaine; " - what would any of us have left to protect?"
Nine years and nine months later, he will search desperately for the answer to that question.
And dodge the answer by rewriting the future.
{ bottom of the ninth }
The only person who understands him, perhaps, is Miura Haru. They both came to idolize an ideal, and spared no second thought for the consequence or the pain.
So he is able to ask her, one day, without hesitation; "Do you love him in the way that a woman loves a man, or the way a mother loves her child, or in the way that a priestess loves her god?"
They're sitting on the swings in the park, at sunset, and watching the Tenth and the lawn-head's little sister going down the slide together, his arms around her waist and a blush on her face.
And the stupid girl on the swings beside him looks at him, with sympathy, and says with her eyes that she knows the bleak, hopeless despondence that he can't help but feel.
"None of those," she says with her mouth; with understanding, with gentleness. "I love him in the simple, honest way that a girl loves her first crush: whole-heartedly, and eventually able to live without."
Not 'love', then.
But surely it isn't love, though, that leads to this: in his apartment, sweet sixteen, with the curtains drawn and his toes curled into the bed. Surely it isn't love, then, that leads him to dig crests into his lower lip with his teeth, and imagine that the hands touching him are smaller, and more forgiving than his own.
(Love, he thinks, would be something like this: the Tenth, face flushed but perpetually serene, gazing down on him as he does his duty from between a pair of strong, spread legs.)
But it occurs to him, as the sweat runs rivulets through his fingers and the night lights of Namimori filter in through his curtained window, that he isn't sure where he would rather be, anymore, when it comes to his relationship with the Tenth.
On his side, or at his feet?
The first makes him sigh, with pleasure, but it's the second that has him coming, hard, all over his hand.
"He who loves others must first love himself," Shamal says to him, one day, on visit from his post in Italy, but he drinks, and gambles the night away, and then spends the night in someone else's bed.
"How was I supposed to know that she was the senator's daughter?" he whines to Gokudera the next day, chain-smoking a pack of foreign cigs and holding the ice pack up to his swollen eye. "They're not exactly a familiar face in the red-light district, for God's sake."
"Are you my father?" Gokudera blurts out, without thinking.
Because this is the closest thing he's known to familial love: a doctor who stinks of blood and booze, and a sister who might be pretty if he could catch a glimpse of her face for more than five seconds at a time.
And the six or so others who share his same gruesome fate.
Shamal laughs so hard that his answer is riddled with hiccups.
"F-Face reality, kid," he says, amusedly but not unkindly, "you're - hic!"
"Too old to be any brat of mine, and - hic!"
"Honestly, smart enough to know better."
But if he were that smart, then he wouldn't have wasted almost a quarter of his life by wishing for things that he knew in his heart he could never have.
"G-Gokudera-kun, what...?"
{ vongola the tenth }
They're watching those fireworks that they promised they'd watch together, back when they were children and they thought that they would have all of the time in the world. And as the colors exploded, brightly, into the air, it had occurred to Gokudera then that they would only be remembered for as long as the moment that they burned.
So he takes the Tenth, calmly, by the hand, and puts a gentle hand over his mouth to keep him quiet, and leads him into the shelter of the woods.
It goes like this; not in his heart or his head but in reality: "G-Gokudera-kun, what...?" the Tenth starts, worriedly, and Gokudera steps forward, determinedly, and seals their fate with a kiss.
And, regardless of the happiness or sadness of the memories that come after, he's at least found his answer.
AN: Ooh, some kind of 'choose your own adventure' ending! "What the hell is this shit, Lori?" you all might be asking, but fuck you all, I'm not telling. (lol) I...am so sorry that this came out as more gen than 5927, Ruka. Like...you have no idea how upset I am about it. I really wanted to write you something worth all of the selfless praise that you've always given me, but this...was totally not what you wanted and da;fkadfkads'jdflaskfjds. *sigh*
I'm kind of digging 6927 for my next fic or something, Iunno. That pairing intrigues me, mostly because of bitching J-art and doujinshis and the like. Anybody have any good fics to rec for that pairing? (WHEN THE HELL AM I GOING TO WRITE MY OTP, ALREADY? #^@($&#*($&)(#*)(*$)@!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I colored my hair, BTW. :) It's this ridiculously dark mahogany-red now. I like it loads.
OH LAWDY.
Written for rukawagf, for being the awesomest person on the planet faithfully reading every single one of my fics ever since my Code Geass days, including that terrible cross-dressing smut I did for the anonymous kink meme. She's a regular trooper. ♥
Her reviews are always ridiculously fun to read, too. :) Oh Ruka, you're so good at pretending to actually LIKE the things that I write...! *shot* *laugh*
Title: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Author: Carson McCullers Lorelei DiAngelo
Rating: I AM LABELING THIS AS 'R', GODDAMMIT, AND IF ANY OF YOU TRY AND TELL ME OTHERWISE... I dunno, I'll change the rating, and whine about it a lot, or something.
Pairing: Gokudera ---> Tsuna. This is the most canonical fic I have ever written, lol. Oh, Amano Akira, you and your obligatory man-crush characters. (Gokkun's got nothing on Diethard from Code Geass, though. Sorry, Amano-sensei. Hunh, now I want Diethard/Lelouch fic from Code Geass season 1 verse. Shit, I just dug my own grave, there.) For the record, there's also some 80 ---> 59 in this that ultimately doesn't matter, so you can ignore it if you like, Ruka.
Summary: In which Gokudera's life is categorized by more than just one word, and I blatantly rip off someone else's writing style. (Forget whose, though.) Also, %85 of the cast gets the shaft when it comes to screentime in this fic.
For: rukawagf, who seems to have taken it upon herself to be my personal pimp. SO YOU GUYS BETTER WATCH IT, OR SHE'LL SLAP A HO. (!) Ahaha, on a more serious note, nothing makes me smile more than Ruka's reviews (yamikakyuu's are pretty good, too XD), just because she puts so much...ah, ENTHUSIASM in them, so to speak. :) Hopefully this is up your alley of things 59 ---> 27, Ruka. You're tough to please with this pairing.
Notes: I'd like to point out that it sure sucks, shipping everything in this fandom. Also, wao, four fics in and I haven't even written anything for my OTP yet. Doesn't matter anyway, 'cuz now after 191 it looks like we're all going to be shipping Gokkun/Ryohei, for the extreme justice. And etc. (Or, uh, still shipping Gamma/nubile teenaged boys, as if we all weren't already. GOD DAMN IT, SOMEONE WRITE THIS ALREADY.)
Word Count: 3,616. I'm sorry this wasn't longer, Ruka, but the style I was writing in kind of errs towards brevity. I AM A WORM. D:
His first memory is this: a voice on the phone; childlike, yet in possession of an unmistakeable air of maturity. "I've found the man that you will follow for the rest of your life. And if you can't follow him, then you're more than welcome to kill him."
"As a matter of fact, I'd like it if you tried killing him, anyway. Where these things are concerned, he really is a bit soft."
"A condition? You're free to do whatever you like. But I'll be counting on you for the results."
And a click in his ears sharper than the hammer on any gun.
If he can't find a family to fit into, then he'll just go ahead and make one of his own.
{ ground zero }
And that first memory which leads to this: a back alley in Florence, with a fifteen-hour flight and the rest of his life ahead of him, though he had no way of knowing that, yet. His bombs and his cigs tucked carefully in the duffel bag next to his visa. And crouched behind a trash can, shoulders hunched, the hand down his jeans the hand that was curled into a tight, unrelenting fist.
(It'll go like this, or so he thinks: a foreigner's face, blurred and nondescript, pinned to the ground by the palm of his hand. Curses, spat at him, as the man struggles and writhes against the fields of debris. Smoke drifting by in a lazy blur. He lights the bastard's last cigarette. His fingers twitch until everything explodes.)
But if he were to be completely honest with himself, what he was actually aiming for was the man who he would follow for the rest of his life.
{ first impression }
Unfortunately, Gokudera Hayato's first memory of Sawada Tsunayoshi is this: a boy, brown-haired and brown-eyed, blinking up at him from behind a school desk with all the naivety of clean slate written upon his stupid, smiling face.
So he kicks the pansy's desk, just to see his expression change.
But maybe, the only reason he did it that way was because he was too chicken to just go up and say hello.
From the time he was born until the time he left home, he was nothing more than a reminder of a past better left swept under the rug. His only real memory of his mother was a memory not of her, but of what she'd left behind - cold stares, a whisper behind hands, and a present that, to him, never stopped stinking of burning rubber.
He remembers resenting her, but as he lounges against a classroom window and listens to the pathetic whiner of a Vongola boss attempt to peace-talk his way out of a certain beating, he comes to the realization that he no longer remembers loving her.
{ second chance }
The first memory of the man he will follow for the rest of his life is this: Sawada Tsunayoshi, singed and bruised and bloody in more places than one, flopping on his ass from exhaustion in nothing more than his boxer shorts and still managing to have the gall celebrate the fact that the both of them are alive. That Gokudera, too, is alive.
That he's alive the next time he gets into a fight. And the next time.
And all the times after that.
His memory of what Reborn says to him is this:
"You should have tried harder, at killing him. Then the two of you wouldn't be so disappointingly soft."
His memory of the day that follows is hazy, at best. He follows the Tenth everywhere - studies him, guards him, keeps close to him. It's that last that makes him wonder if somewhere, along the line, he hadn't confused the word 'Family' for family, but the one thing he'd never bothered to learn in his studies was the Japanese equivalent for the same word.
Besides, he doesn't like Japan. Yamamoto Takeshi is proof enough of that.
{ and then there were three }
The first memory of his obnoxious rival is this: kids running, to and fro, below the entrance to the school, pointing wildly at the spectacle up above them.
"Holy shit!" they say, "someone's going to jump!"
And Gokudera, on the way to finangle dynamite from his father's mafia connections in Japan, looks up at the dark shape silhouetted against the sky, and scoffs, and thinks that if the idiot's going to do it, he should just hurry up and do it.
Of course, if he'd have known then how things were going to turn out in the future, he probably would have offered his ready assistance.
This is something that doesn't change until they grow older: the Tenth, because he is far more progressive and grand than the other bosses before him, doesn't punish the baseball idiot for his impertinence - rather, accepts it, as humbly and unassumingly as he accepts everything else in his life. The same way that he accepts the cow's stupidity, the Cavallone's meddling, and the lawn-head's extremity.
So then why, why, can't he accept Gokudera's unconditional life and loyalty, as well?
Of course, with conditions such as those, it was only natural that it would lead to this: in the restroom, cutting class, back jammed into the corner of the stall and a leg on the toilet seat; "Hggggh," he says, trying not to scream. He thinks of the Tenth, always walking backwards from him, and wonders what it means when the sight of that always prompts him to give chase.
(It'll go like this, or so he thinks: he'll take a step, two steps, and close the gap between them, hands going to the Tenth's shoulders in a gentle, but confident hold. The Tenth has long, fringed eyelashes - he'll blink them once, in surprise, but not in the usual routine caution. He'll say his name, in a concerned question.
And Gokudera, possessing the courage in fantasy that he lacks in reality, will be able to say what he means, for once, and mean what he says, and so he will: "I swore that I'd follow you, Tenth, and so I always will. But it's lonely, sometimes, always looking at the line of your back."
And the Tenth will cover his hands with his own, and stand on his tiptoes, because he is deceptively slight like that, and he'll tilt his head up; upward - )
And Gokudera comes, with a terrible cry, heedless of where he is and how foolish this makes him.
{ fourscore }
His worst memory is this: in a warehouse, under fire, crouched behind oil drums that could erupt into flames at any second, and the Tenth is at his side. They were seventeen, just normal kids for once and going for a coffee when the first M-80 opened fire on them. There's no X-Gloves, no Dying Will Bullet, no Reborn shouting over their shoulders about what they're supposed to do. There's just Gokudera, down to his last three explosives, and the Tenth, huddling desperately at his side.
"I wish, I wish," he says, through clenched, chattering teeth, "I wish that Yamamoto were here."
It gives Gokudera a sort of fierce satisfaction to know that, on that day seven years later, that the baseball idiot was there; had been there, sword at his side, and hadn't been able to stop the Tenth from dying any more than the rest of them had.
But that, of course, means nothing, when compared to the terrible crushing pain of his heart.
The future is a far-off thing when you're fifteen years old, though. He sits and plays mahjong with the Tenth and his family and his Family, and loses on purpose because, well, the Tenth can't possibly be good at everything. It's enough that there's an ideal in his every action; something for people to drift towards, to lay down their life for.
Their legs brush, under the table, and Gokudera inhales; forgets everything, for one great, glorious second, even the fact that he's supposed to be losing.
"Sorry," the Tenth says, warily, as though afraid that he's going to explode.
The truth of which leads to something like this: in a restroom, in Shinjuku, surrounded by the telephone numbers of girls in possession of various degrees of morality, belt in his teeth to keep from biting his tongue. It's only that he's not good enough. How can he expect the Tenth to surrender his heart to someone he constantly has to save? His hands falter, and he almost loses his grip.
(It'll go like this, if he has his way: a powerful opponent, one that even the Tenth himself would undoubtedly have to bloody his hands over. He'll dispatch him in a pinch, with a careless flick of his wrist - rather like the one he's doing now; faster, harder, tangible. It's another foreigner's face, blurred and nondescript. If he squints hard enough, it looks a little bit like his father.
When the smoke clears, the Tenth will say his name; tentatively, but with feeling. "G-Gokudera-kun!" He won't say the boyish, naive things that he usually says out of surprise ('Wow!', 'That's amazing!', or 'He knocked him out with a single shot...' among those - because they're powerful, they both are, and modesty can only extend so far). Maybe he won't say anything - reality is harsh. The joy of fantasy, though, is that things will always proceed as planned, simply because he wishes it that way.
"I'm glad that you're my right-hand man.")
And there doesn't need to be any more to it than that, for him to go soaring over the edge.
In ten years, one of those wishes will come true. But by then, he'll have discovered what it is that he actually wants, and all of it will mean naught.
{ five o'clock shadow }
He has no memory of the first time he gets drunk.
He has a nightmare, though, of running down a long, long corridor where only darkness and shadow seemed to reach.
He also has a large, conspicuous red mark on the side of his neck.
It makes his heart flutter in his chest to think of the memory he's missed, to think of himself, held; marked, by the Tenth - as a precious possession, maybe, or even as a person.
The former exalts him, beyond comprehensible belief, but he can't quite figure why the latter terrifies him, as well.
But it's Yamamoto who avoids him, in the halls, who turns his head away with an uncharacteristic tension to his frame, and the Tenth smiles, desperately, and tries to smooth things over.
Why?
{ sixth sense }
"Well," the baseball idiot says, awkwardly, still holding on to his obnoxious, infuriating half-grin, "all you had to do was use your imagination, you know? I've just never been smart enough," he says, and that grin falters, by the barest milli-step, "to be particularly creative, if you know what I mean."
Gokudera, pale and cold in the light of mid-November, pulls the scarf he'd wrapped around his neck all the way up to his nose. "Sorry," he mutters, and it's the first and last time he'll say anything like that to the Vongola's Guardian of the Rain.
"It'd probably have been better if you hadn't said that," Yamamoto admits, pulling his woolen ski cap down over his eyes, and he lets out a breath that is the same pale ephemeral color as Gokudera's hair. "It wasn't as though you'd lied, after all."
A very uncharacteristic noise, from between clenched teeth.
"You never looked, not once, at me."
"Did you guys make up?" the Tenth asks, the next, beaming at them hopefully from across his desk in the classroom.
Gokudera gnaws on an unlit cigarette irritably. "As if anyone would want to make up with an idiot like him," he growls, because the point of it is, after all, to pretend as though he doesn't feel like he's just been shot.
"Well, that's probably true," Yamamoto laughs, voice light, and goes back to his lunch.
His memory of when everything began to change started like this:
"G-Gokudera-kun..." At a streetlight in Narita, on the way to pick up the Cavallone from the airport. Fresh out of high school - it wasn't that the Tenth wasn't smart enough for college, but rather, smart enough to see that there'd be no need for such a thing in a future as glorious as his. And because he hadn't gone, Gokudera hadn't, either. He doesn't bother dwelling on what a choice like that might portend.
"Can I try...one of your cigarettes?"
He's grown up lithe and lean, but the Tenth is still slight, with a narrow chest and a voice that never seemed to grow deeper with age, or with any of the things that they'd been through. He'll probably cough, and wheeze, and hate it, but it doesn't really matter. Gokudera digs the smokes from out of his jeans pocket and wishes that he'd at least had the grace to smoke lights.
But the Tenth lights one, and takes a puff, and though he stumbles a bit on it as the taller boy had predicted, he takes another puff, and another one after that, and one after that. And after a minute or so, he drops the butt onto the ground, and grinds it unhesitatingly under his toe.
"That wasn't so bad," he acknowledges, smiling, and Gokudera wonders why, suddenly, despite the smoke still drifting by on the breeze, that the air smells unmistakably like lilies.
{ lucky sevens }
He sets to change himself, little by little, so that he becomes a man worthy of the Tenth's right side.
"I think you should just keep going the way that you are," Yamamoto says, candidly, but of course Gokudera doesn't listen.
"If you truly love him, Hayato," his sister says, in one of her rare familial cameos, shooting the baseball idiot needles out of the corner of her eyes, "then nothing else but love should matter."
And though he wishes more than anything that he hadn't, he vomits all over her shoes, regardless.
The problem is, when he thinks of a word like 'love', his face grows red and he feels distinctly uncomfortable, and he can't imagine ever crossing that line. Even in his ever-colorful imagination, that carefully-constructed rainbow prison, he never crosses that line. There are gentle touches, to his face, arms around his waist and sometimes a feather-light brush of lips in a kiss, but in the instant he tries to imagine nails like claws or a hand between his thighs, he grows so embarrassed and miserable that he thinks he might die.
In reality, the best reward is just to be by the Tenth's side.
So he is, even as the last of the bullets riddle his boss's chest, and he bursts through the door a second too late, explosives out and at the ready for the roomful of men who have already gone.
So he is, even as the coffin starts to lose its brilliant, glossy sheen, and the cloying scent of lilies is enough to make him choke.
So he is, when the lid cracks, one day, and a small, rosy hand appears, and the unruly brown hair a moment after.
"Tenth!"
{ crazy eights }
That's the happiest memory of his life.
The saddest comes seconds after:
"G-Gokudera-kun... Why is the future me...in a coffin?"
But that's in a future that may or may not come to pass. Eight years before that, he was a boy stretched out on the balcony of the Tenth's bedroom at night, finding a strange solitary comfort from the lines of Aquarius.
"Is it a hobby of yours?" the Tenth asks, politely, stepping out into the chill with some tea.
Hobbies? He had those, once. Even as a stray dog in Italy, he had those - things like playing cards, or the piano, or the mythological folklore of foreign countries.
Now, what is it that he has?
"You can find your direction with the stars," Gokudera says, contentedly, sticking his finger up the nose of Orion, eyes half-mast. "It'll be useful if the Family's ever separated - being able to find a rendevous point without relying on the use of electronics. It can be used for reconnaissance, too, or keeping track of time."
"Oh," the Tenth says carefully, mildly; "I thought that maybe you did it for fun."
He's shivering, out in the cold, and Gokudera shrugs out of his sweatshirt; holds it out, helpfully. Hobbies are weak points that enemies can exploit, but it should be all right enough now that he only has one thing in the world that he cares about.
"We can start," he says, smiling, and his heart does backflips in his chest as their hands touch, briefly, and his smile is returned.
The moon is in the eighth house of Jupiter one night, and his most bittersweet memory is this: the two of them, huddled under a quilt with their faces turned to the sky, and a star falls like an angel out of the air.
"Make a wish, Tenth!" He'll do whatever it takes to make it come true.
But this is why he hates reality:
"Then, I wish that none of this had ever happened to me."
"I mean - I wish that I hadn't gotten involved. Gotten any of you involved. Never heard the word 'mafia' before in my life. That we could've been normal classmates - just normal friends. That I could have gotten better at everything on my own."
One of the gaps between the two of them is the gap that's somewhat easy to overcome. Shoulders, stiff under his cold arms, and a face, warm and bewildered, pressed tightly into the crook of his shoulder.
"Then, then - " Gokudera says calmly, as calm as the eye in the center of a hurricaine; " - what would any of us have left to protect?"
Nine years and nine months later, he will search desperately for the answer to that question.
And dodge the answer by rewriting the future.
{ bottom of the ninth }
The only person who understands him, perhaps, is Miura Haru. They both came to idolize an ideal, and spared no second thought for the consequence or the pain.
So he is able to ask her, one day, without hesitation; "Do you love him in the way that a woman loves a man, or the way a mother loves her child, or in the way that a priestess loves her god?"
They're sitting on the swings in the park, at sunset, and watching the Tenth and the lawn-head's little sister going down the slide together, his arms around her waist and a blush on her face.
And the stupid girl on the swings beside him looks at him, with sympathy, and says with her eyes that she knows the bleak, hopeless despondence that he can't help but feel.
"None of those," she says with her mouth; with understanding, with gentleness. "I love him in the simple, honest way that a girl loves her first crush: whole-heartedly, and eventually able to live without."
Not 'love', then.
But surely it isn't love, though, that leads to this: in his apartment, sweet sixteen, with the curtains drawn and his toes curled into the bed. Surely it isn't love, then, that leads him to dig crests into his lower lip with his teeth, and imagine that the hands touching him are smaller, and more forgiving than his own.
(Love, he thinks, would be something like this: the Tenth, face flushed but perpetually serene, gazing down on him as he does his duty from between a pair of strong, spread legs.)
But it occurs to him, as the sweat runs rivulets through his fingers and the night lights of Namimori filter in through his curtained window, that he isn't sure where he would rather be, anymore, when it comes to his relationship with the Tenth.
On his side, or at his feet?
The first makes him sigh, with pleasure, but it's the second that has him coming, hard, all over his hand.
"He who loves others must first love himself," Shamal says to him, one day, on visit from his post in Italy, but he drinks, and gambles the night away, and then spends the night in someone else's bed.
"How was I supposed to know that she was the senator's daughter?" he whines to Gokudera the next day, chain-smoking a pack of foreign cigs and holding the ice pack up to his swollen eye. "They're not exactly a familiar face in the red-light district, for God's sake."
"Are you my father?" Gokudera blurts out, without thinking.
Because this is the closest thing he's known to familial love: a doctor who stinks of blood and booze, and a sister who might be pretty if he could catch a glimpse of her face for more than five seconds at a time.
And the six or so others who share his same gruesome fate.
Shamal laughs so hard that his answer is riddled with hiccups.
"F-Face reality, kid," he says, amusedly but not unkindly, "you're - hic!"
"Too old to be any brat of mine, and - hic!"
"Honestly, smart enough to know better."
But if he were that smart, then he wouldn't have wasted almost a quarter of his life by wishing for things that he knew in his heart he could never have.
"G-Gokudera-kun, what...?"
{ vongola the tenth }
They're watching those fireworks that they promised they'd watch together, back when they were children and they thought that they would have all of the time in the world. And as the colors exploded, brightly, into the air, it had occurred to Gokudera then that they would only be remembered for as long as the moment that they burned.
So he takes the Tenth, calmly, by the hand, and puts a gentle hand over his mouth to keep him quiet, and leads him into the shelter of the woods.
It goes like this; not in his heart or his head but in reality: "G-Gokudera-kun, what...?" the Tenth starts, worriedly, and Gokudera steps forward, determinedly, and seals their fate with a kiss.
And, regardless of the happiness or sadness of the memories that come after, he's at least found his answer.
AN: Ooh, some kind of 'choose your own adventure' ending! "What the hell is this shit, Lori?" you all might be asking, but fuck you all, I'm not telling. (lol) I...am so sorry that this came out as more gen than 5927, Ruka. Like...you have no idea how upset I am about it. I really wanted to write you something worth all of the selfless praise that you've always given me, but this...was totally not what you wanted and da;fkadfkads'jdflaskfjds. *sigh*
I'm kind of digging 6927 for my next fic or something, Iunno. That pairing intrigues me, mostly because of bitching J-art and doujinshis and the like. Anybody have any good fics to rec for that pairing? (WHEN THE HELL AM I GOING TO WRITE MY OTP, ALREADY? #^@($&#*($&)(#*)(*$)@!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I colored my hair, BTW. :) It's this ridiculously dark mahogany-red now. I like it loads.